At the present time, such some conventional lighters have become very popular. One of the reasons for their popularity is that their structure is simple, the operation is reliable, it is easy to ignite and production costs are low. However, such conventional lighters also bear the drawbacks as follows.
Their safety is not sufficient. Most such lighters are designed to be easily operated by children so that it broods the danger that, if it is accidentally lighted, or if a child plays with it, a hellish catastrophe can occur. In addition, since such igniting manipulation requires the operator's thumb to rotate the spark wheel to ignite the lighter, it is easy to suffer injuries to the operator's hand and get his hand dirty.
Therefore, there is a need to incorporate a safety feature with conventional gas lighters to make them difficult to ignite by children. One typical method is to incorporate a rotatable wheel hood having a safety position and an activation position, which is placed over the striker. Such a design is able to hinder the rotation of the striker wheel especially by children to prevent it from striking the flint stone to give out spark. An example of such mechanism is shown in U.S. Pat. No. 5,846,069.
However, it is not a wise way of trying to lock the striker. Some smart or brilliant children may release such a mechanism and ignite the fire because there is no any lockable mechanism in direction {circle around (1)}. As long as the wheel hood is put off, striker wheel edge can be rotated so as to create a spark. Obviously, the present invention provides a safety gas lighter with a ratchet-pawl mechanism, which is a better way to prevent the children from igniting a lighter and is greatly different from U.S. Pat. No. 5,846,069.
Regarding the ratchet-pawl mechanism, it consists of a ratchet wheel and a pawl and permits motion in only one direction. Such a mechanism is especially in lifting devices and some hand tools. However, Iwahori in U.S. Pat. No. 5,468,144 also discloses a ratchet-pawl mechanism. But in Iwahori's invention, its ratchet-pawl mechanism only use to rotate the rotary file 4 in one direction, whereby producing sparks.
As far as the present invention is concerned, the ratchet-pawl mechanism according to the present invention has the following two functions: a) the safety hood 20 needs to be transferred to an activation position; and b) under the condition a), the safety hood 20 needs to be pressed back, whereby simultaneously rotating the striker wheel in order to give out sparks. Therefore, even if the person skilled in the art did transfer the teaching of U.S. Pat. No. 5,468,144 to the rotatable wheel hood of U.S. Pat. No. 5,846,069, the transfer would still not result in the safety hood of the present invention.